Guides

Reference pages about what job application forms actually contain. Not advice, not predictions — counts, from one instrumented job search, with the query that produced every number printed on the page.

These pages exist because the data already existed. Running an automated job search generates a detailed log of every form field it could not answer and every email that came back. Nobody had published that, so we did. No employer is named on any of these pages, deliberately.

What application forms actually ask

6,521 distinct questions seen 61,717 times across Greenhouse, Workday, Ashby, Lever and Avature, grouped into 17 categories by a published rule list. Includes why a Workday question repeats about 37× while Greenhouse barely repeats at all, and the 213 questions that are deliberately left blank.

What Workday actually asks

10,708 Workday questions collapse into 293 distinct ones, because Workday is configured per employer and reused across their whole board. 44.8% of them are about who you already know there. Plus where Workday applications stall before submit.

What employers actually send back

10,217 inbound emails from 700 companies, classified. 83.5% is machine-generated, 10.8% was written by a person, and 53 messages in total were about an interview. Measured 2026-11-07.

Pay transparency, measured

222,600+ machine-readable pay figures from 645,000+ postings across two 2026 harvest windows. Which platforms carry pay (the spread is an order of magnitude), what posted engineer ranges look like (median band: $60,000 wide), and why naive job-board salary trends report the crawler, not the market.

Where did that recruiter get your resume?

After 2,800+ applications through one job board, its own relay carried 3 recruiter messages — while 118 unlabeled direct emails arrived from 21 staffing agencies we had applied to. "Random" recruiter outreach, attributed.

Every number, its query, and its age

The instrument page behind all of the above: each statistic this site publishes, the exact query or command that produced it, when it was measured, and the honest list of numbers no instrument can currently reproduce.